Beyond words

American Historical Review

Volumn 110, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 1015-1045

  Auslander, Leora ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749831501     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.110.4.1015     Document Type: Review

References (154)

1. Marc Bloch, La société féodale (Paris, 1939).
2. The following is a small selection of the many examples that could be offered here: Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, trans. Miriam Koch an (London, 1974);
3. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley, Calif., 1988);
4. Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul (Baltimore, Md., 2005);
5. Laurel Ulrich, The Age of Homespun (New York, 2001);
6. Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and the Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Princeton, N.J., 1997);
7. Deborah Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley, Calif., 1989);
8. Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities (Berkeley, Calif., 1998).
9. For the utility of the distinction, see Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things (New York, 1992). For excellent examples of analysis of industrial design,
10. see Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects (Berkeley, Calif., 2004),
11. and Alison J. Clarke, Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Washington, D.C., 1999).
12. I am, therefore, following a different course, engaged in a different project, than either scholars such as Jonathan Crary and Donald Lowe, who have attempted to historicize the ways in which people have used their five senses, or those such as Martin Jay and Catherine Chalier, who have focused on demonstrating the place attributed to each of the senses within particular bodies of thought. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge. Mass., 1992);
13. Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago, 1982);
14. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, Calif., 1993);
15. Catherine Chalier. Sagesse des sens: Le regard et l'écoute dans la tradition hébraïque (Paris, 1995).
16. Roland Fletcher, "The Messages of Material Behaviour: A Preliminary Discussion of Non-verbal Meaning,"
17. and Miles Richardson, "The Artefact as Abbreviated Act: A Social Interpretation of Material Culture," both in lan Hodder, ed., The Meaning of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression (London, 1989), 33-30 and 172-177;
18. Fred R. Meyers, "Introduction: The Empire of Things," in Myers, ed., The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 2001), 3-64;
19. Michael Brian Schiffer and Andrea R. Miller, The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, Communication (London, 1999);
20. Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford, 2000). I am not, however, arguing for & privileged status for material culture,
21. as Jules Frown does in his classic article "The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction," in Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery, eds., History from Things: Essays on Material Culture (Washington, D.C., 1993), 1-19.
22. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (New York, 1983);
23. Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York, 1967).
24. For three historical analyses of clothing that meld (to varying degrees) discourse, practice, and object, see Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the "Ancien Régime," trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1994);
25. David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modem Masculinity (Berkeley, Calif., 2002);
26. Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy (Chicago, 2003).
27. On this point, coming from two radically different theoretical traditions, see the work of Bruno Latour and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Bruno Latour, "Mixing Humans and Non-humans Together: The Sociology of a Door Closer," Social Problems 35, no. 3 (1988): 298-310;
28. Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands," Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986): 1-40;
29. Latour, "Une sociologie sans objet? Remarques sur l'interobjectivité," Sociologie du Travail, no. 4 (1994): 567-610;
30. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge, 1981), 14.
31. For example, on the embodied and materialized nature of power in the French Old Regime, see Guy Walton, Louis XIV's Versailles (Chicago, 1986);
32. Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism (New York, 1968);
33. Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1990);
34. Lynn Hunt, ed. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993);
35. Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore, Md., 1990).
36. On domestic objects as a means of the creation of self and group, see Martine Segalen and Béatrix Le Wita, Chez-soi: Objets et décors - des créations familiales? (Paris, 1993);
37. C. Després, "De la maison bourgeoise à la maison moderne: Univers domestique, esthétique et sensibilité féminine," in D. Piché, ed., Lieux et milieux de vie, spécial issue of Recherches féministes 2, no. 1 (1989); 3-18;
38. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things;
39. Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction (Paris, 1979).
40. Many texts could be cited here. In addition to those cited above and below, see Helga Ditterman, The Social Psychology of Material Possessions: To Have Is to Be (Kernel Hempstead, 1992). From a psychoanalytic perspective,
41. see Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L'Ecorce et le noyau (Paris, 1987),
42. and Serge Tisseron, Comment l'esprit vient aux objets (Paris, 1999).
43. A quite different reading of Freud can be found in Adrian Forty's introduction to Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler, eds., The Art of Forgetting (Oxford, 1999).
44. D. W. Winnicott, Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-analysis (London, 1958).
45. Cited in Patrizia Ciambelli, Bijoux à Secrets (Paris, 2002), 75. Emphasis added.
46. Yolande Tisscron-Papetti and Serge Tisseron, L'érotisme du toucher des étoffes (Paris, 1982), 86.
47. As Sarah Kofman movingly put it in her memoir in reference to the last sign of life of her father-a card written in French by someone else in Drancy-"When my mother died, it wasn't possible to find that card, which I had reread so often and wanted to save. It was as if I had lost my father a second time. From then on nothing was left, not even that lone card he hadn't even written." Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener Rue Labal, trans. with an intro. by Ann Smock (Lincoln, Nebr., 1996), 9.
48. On the importance of the senses, see Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia, Pa., 1989). For an anthropological approach to the intersection of objects and people,
49. see Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People's Lives (New York, 1998).
50. Julian Thomas, "The Hermeneutics of Megalithic Space," in Christopher Y. Tilley, éd., Interpretative Archaeology (Providence, R.1., 1993), 73-97.
51. On space and memory, see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966);
52. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1962);
53. Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire (Paris, 1999);
54. Nicole Lapierre, Le Silence de la Mémoire: À la recherche des juifs de Plock (Paris, 2001), 107, 108, 109;
55. JoËlle Bahloul, La maison de mémoire: Ethnologie d'un demeure judéo-arabe en Algérie (1937-1961) (Paris, 1992);
56. Anne Muxel, Individu et mémoire familiale (Paris, 1996);
57. and particularly on the issues of refugees and objects, David Parkin, "Mementoes as Transitional Objects in Human Displacement," Journal of Material Culture 4, no. 3 (November 1999): 303-320.
58. For a suggestive analysis, see John Lowney, " 'Homesick for Those Memories': The Gendering of Historical Memory in Women's Narratives of the Vietnam War," in Rosemary Marangoly George, ed., Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity (Boulder, Colo., 1998), 257-278, particularly 265.
59. Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l'espace (Paris, 1957), 74.
60. Leora Auslander, "Perceptions of Beauty and the Problem of Consciousness: Parisian Furniture Makers," in Lenard Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana, Ill., and Chicago, 1993), 149-181.
61. Anne Martin-Fugier, La place des bonnes: Lu domesticité féminine à Paris en 1900 (Paris, 1979);
62. Jacqueline Martin-Huan, La longue marche des domestiques en France: Du XIXe siècle à nos jours (Nantes, 1997).
63. See, for example, Ruth Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983);
64. Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982).
65. T. H. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford, 2004).
66. Here, of course, the key text of Marx is chapter 1, "The Commodity," in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. trans. Ben Fowkes (New York, 1977);
67. Jean Baudrillard, La société de la consommation: Ses mythes, ses structures (Paris, 1970).
68. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. and with an intro. by Peter Demetz (New York, 1986);
69. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, with an intro. by Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968).
70. For a very useful analysis of exchange under capitalism, see J. G. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (London, 1995).
71. Norbert Elias and those influenced by him have been key here. Elias, The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978; German ed. 1939);
72. Roger Chartier, ed., Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
73. Jean Comaraoff and John Comaroff, "Fashioning the Colonial Subject: The Empire's Old Clothes," in Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago, 1991), vol. 2, chap. 2, 218-273;
74. Comaroff and Comaroff, "Homemade Hegemony," in John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination: Selected Essays (Boulder, Colo., 1992), chap. 10, 265-295;
75. Bernard S. Cohn, "Cloth, Clothes and Colonialism: India in the 19th century," in Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, eds., Cloth and Human Experience (Washington, D.C., 1989), 303-353;
76. Jean Allman, Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington, Ind., 2004);
77. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., 1991);
78. Thomas, In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Durham, N.C., 1997).
79. For exemplary fiction, see Honoré de Balzac, Le cousin Pons, La cousine Bette, Histoire des treize (Paris, 1840);
80. Émile Zola, Au bonheur des dames (Paris, 1883);
81. Zola, Nana (Paris, 1882);
82. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris, 1919-1927);
83. Georges Perec, Les choses: Une histoire des années soixante (Paris, 1965);
84. Perec, La vie, mode d'emploi: Romans (Paris, 1978);
85. Francis Ponge, La table présentée par Jean Thibaudeau (Paris, 1991);
86. Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (Paris, 1949);
87. Ponge, Le savon (Paris, 1967).
88. Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York, 1985);
89. Naomi Schor, "Before the Castle: Women, Commodities, and Modernity in Au Bonheur des Dames," in Schor, Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (Durham, N.C., 1995);
90. Paul-Laurent Assoun et al., Analyses et réflexions sur Ponge, Pièce: Les mots et les choses (Paris, 1988);
91. Mieke Bal, Images littéraires: Ou comment lire visuellement Proust (Montréal/Toulouse, 1997);
92. Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann, Beschreibung als Verfahren: Die Ästhetik des Objekts im Werk Marcel Prousts (Stuttgart, 1980);
93. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire (London, 1983). For a crucial theoretical intervention on the relation of literature and things,
94. see Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, 2003).
95. Jules D. Prown, "Material/Cultural: Can the Farmer and the Cowman Still Be Friends?" in W. David Kingery, ed., Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies (Washington, D.C., 1996), 19-30.
96. For a summary of the current place of theory in archaeology, see the essays gathered in lan Hodder, ed., Archaeological Theory Today (Cambridge, 2001),
97. and Christopher Carr and Jill E. Neitzel, eds., Style, Society and Person: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives (New York, 1995).
98. Marcel Mauss, "Techniques of the Body," in Jonathan Crary and S. Kwinter, eds., Zone, vol. 6: Incorporations (New York, 1992), 455-477;
99. Mauss, The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls (New York, 1990).
100. Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, 1986), 64-91;
101. Appadurai, "Introduction; Commodities and the Politics of Value," The Social Life of Things ibid., 3-63.
102. Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford, 1987).
103. Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell Stories of People's Lives (New York, 1998);
104. Paul Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia, Pa., 1997);
105. Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology' (Philadelphia, Pa., 1989).
106. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society from Wedgwood to IBM (New York, 1986).
107. Susan Pearce, ed., Experiencing Material Culture in the Western World (London. 1997);
108. Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections (Leicester. 1992).
109. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, "Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe," in Reid and Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism (Oxford, 1999), 1-24.
110. See also the other essays in that volume, as well as Crowley and Reid, Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford, 2002),
111. and Caroline Humphrey, "Creating a Culture of Disillusionment: Consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times," in Daniel Miller, ed., Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local (London, 1995), 43-68.
112. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York, 1949; repr., 1975);
113. Katherine Fischer Taylor, In the Theater of Criminal Justice: The Palais de Justice in Second Empire Paris (Princeton, N.J., 1993).
114. Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J., 1987),
115. chap. 9; John Michael Vlach, By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife (Charlottesville, Va., 1991), pt. III.
116. Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
117. Abidin Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space, and Political Cultures in Indonesia (New York, 2000).
118. This discussion builds on the analysis in my recent essay "Regeneration through the Everyday? Furniture in Revolutionary Paris," Art History 28, no. 2 (April 2005): 227-247.
119. A more detailed analysis can be found in my forthcoming book Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in England, Colonial America, and France (Oxford, 2006).
120. In addition to the literature on architecture and clothing cited below, important works on this theme include Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1988);
121. Serge Blanchi, La révolution culturelle de l'an IL Elites et peuple 1789-1799 (Paris, 1982);
122. Lynn Hunt, "Symbolic Forms of Political Practice," in Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984);
123. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1995);
124. Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787-1799 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996).
125. Hector Lefuel, Georges Jacob: Ébéniste du XVIIIè siècle (Paris, 1923);
126. Laurie Dahlberg, "France between the Revolutions, 1789-1848," in Tamara Préaud, éd., The Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory: Alexandre Brongniart and the Triumph of Art and Industry, 1800-1847 (New York, 1997), 16.
127. There are large literatures on both topics. An excellent recent study on clothing is Richard Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford, 2002);
128. on architecture, James A. Leith, Space and Revolution: Projects for Monuments, Squares and Public Buildings in France, 1789-1799 (Montreal, 1991), is still the essential text.
129. On David's designs, see Hunt, "Symbolic Forms of Political Practice."
130. In addition to the above references, see Lynn Hunt, "Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France," in Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, eds., From the Royal to the Republican Body (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 224-250.
131. From the later period, see, for example, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d'un maison (Paris, 1873),
132. and César Daly, L'architecture privée au XlXè siècle sous Napoléon III (Paris, 1864).
133. On this point, sec Auslander, Taste and Power, pt. III;
134. Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, Calif., 2001);
135. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France.
136. For further evidence of these objects, see the holdings of the Musée Carnavalet and the Musée de la Révolution française; they can also be found scattered through other French museums and private collections. See also Colin Jones, "Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social Change," in Colin Lucas, ed., Re-writing the French Revolution (Oxford, 1991), 69-118;
137. Pierre Arizzoli-Clémental et al., Aux armes et aux arts! Les arts de la Révolution, 1789-1799 (Paris, 1988);
138. George Levitine, éd., Culture and Revolution: Cultural Ramifications of the French Revolution (College Park, Md., 1989);
139. Michel Beurdeley, La France à l'encan 1789-1799: Exode des objets d'art sous la Révolution (Paris, 1981).
140. This section of the essay draws on my ongoing research, some of which has appeared in "Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris," Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 237-259,
141. and " 'Jewish Taste'? Jews and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1933-1942," in Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford, 2002), 299-318.
142. Leora Auslander, "After the Revolution: Recycling Ancien Régime Style in the Nineteenth Century," in Bryant T. Ragan and Elizabeth Williams, eds., Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992), 144-174.
143. This conception of national belonging through everyday aesthetics parallels that of Catherine Palmer in "From Theory to Practice: Experiencing the Nation in Everyday Life," Journal of Material Culture 3, no. 2 (1998): 175-199.
144. Archives Nationales. Paris, Series AJ 38. carton 5909 for all these dossiers.
145. As historians Annette Wieviorka and Floriane Azoulay have demonstrated, only about 20 percent of the contents of pillaged homes were ever recovered. Wieviorka and Azoulay, Le Pillage des Appartements et son indemnisation (Paris, 2000).
146. This is a simplified narrative. Petitioners often went back several times to the showrooms as new goods were displayed. Some attempted to alter their inventories after seeing something that they recognized and had forgotten to note (or that they wanted). The extensive paperwork generated by this process is now stored in the series AJ 38 in the Archives Nationales in Paris.
147. For an example of a sketch, see AN 38 AJ 5912, Berno, File no. 286.
148. AN 38 AJ 5909.
149. Ibid.
150. Claudine Vegh, The ne lui ai pas dit au revoir (Paris, 1979), 34.
151. For a compelling analysis of gendered experiences of objects, see Beverly Gordon, "Intimacy and Objects: A Proxemic Analysis of Gender-Based Response to the Material World," in Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames, eds., The Material Culture of Gender, the Gender of Material Culture (Winterthur, Del., 1997). 237, 252.
152. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris, 1992).
153. For an elaboration of this argument and relevant bibliography, see my Taste and Power (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), especially the introduction.
154. For a parallel account of the importance of narrating lost homes, see Bahloul. La maison de mémoire, particularly chap. 9.